David Byrne, day four: speaking in tongues

The final night of David Byrne's four-concert series at Carnegie Hall took place on February 4 in the building's basement, otherwise known as Zankel Hall, and this time he did not perform a single note. The concert instead featured three acts—Haale, Alarm Will Sound, and Camille—performing separately in a program called 'One Note'.

Explaining the concept at the start of the show, Byrne retired his trademark awkwardness in favor of more straightforward communication. Unlike the 'weird folk' concert two nights earlier, the musicians assembled on February 4 were not part of an established scene. The connections among them were made by Byrne himself. Curatorially, he was taking more of a risk. Which leads me to propose a hypothesis about Byrne's stage persona: that there may be a directly proportional relationship between his creative certainty and his professional awkwardness: the more confident he is about what he's doing, the more ostentatiously he performs the rituals and tics of awkwardness. A legacy from the punk era perhaps?

The common trait shared by the night's musicians was that their music tends to feature a drone or single note running through their compositions. All three acts were outstanding. The middle group, Alarm Will Sound, is a contemporary classical ensemble best known for performing orchestral arrangements of Aphex Twin. They played one of those, a piece by Scelsi, and a Renaissance saltarello with unusual attention to visual presentation. I'd like to say more, but I have neither the vocabulary nor the experience to say anything worthwhile about classical music. As good as they were, the other two acts blew me away.

The first act of the night was Haale, whose erotic, hypnotic music offers the union of Iranian Sufism and Jimi Hendrix. True, these days combining unexpected genres is what everyone does and hardly merits a raised eyebrow, let alone a defense. David Byrne has been quietly combining classical strings and Brazilian percussion for a while without offering any manifestos on the subject (nor, regrettably, attracting the attention his music deserves).

In Haale's case, the more one knows about Hendrix and Sufism, the less bizarre the combination sounds. Some years ago, I described Sufis to a friend as 'the hippies of Islam' and I now see, thanks to Google, that I'm not the only one to use that phrase. Her guitarist John Shannon played with the requisite amount of feedback to evoke Hendrix while Haale set sensual fire to the hall by singing songs of passion and poems of Rumi in the ecstatic vocal style that traditional Sufis believed led one to feel the divine. And I was definitely feeling it. It was extremely erotic, to say the least. And at the level of literal influence, she even had a song about Hendrix himself set during his military service when he would sit in the aeroplane listening to the motor and the wind before his parachute jumps. (In the midst of writing this, I just ordered her two EP's from her website. Tune in soon for an update.)

The final act, Camille, was also quite musically sexy but in a much more terrifying vein. She made just about every sound that a human mouth can make from screeching to moaning to burping to slapping her O-shaped mouth with her open hand. One would run out of verbs before her strange oral creativity could be contained. At one point her pianist even hit her in the back while she was singing in order to make her delivery tremble in a new way. Throughout the show she used a digital sampler to capture her strange emanations which would then play in loops to accompany her live singing.

Her songs were so psychologically tricky that I wonder if I can describe them a week later with any justice. (Yes, I'm about to order her cd's, too, just as soon as I finish this entry.) Imagine a fierce, knowing woman, with ample experience of pain, pleasure, and mind games, offering herself to the world with equal measures of sarcasm and desire. Her advances would be part taunt, part warning, and part need. Not a word could be taken only at face value.

Ah, here are some lyrics of hers online:
'He thought he'd run me over in the middle of the night. He thought he was the devil. But I was the devil and I'd chosen him to run me over. My name is Baby Carni Bird.'
[...]
'My name is Baby Carni Bird .
I'm the only one in the world.
I'm yours,
For I can fly up in the air,
And you can shoot me when you like.
I'm yours.'

Now imagine such songs sung in both French and English by a young woman with a voice—and persona—that ranges between Beth Gibbons of Portishead and PJ Harvey. All that plus the onstage antics and charisma of someone who knows she can get away with anything. Anything.

I don't know how deliberate it was on Byrne's part, but the evening was perfectly framed by the two young women. At one end of the night, eroticism as religious ecstasy performed by a delicate-seeming woman of earnest passion and tenderness. At the other, the outrage of a fuck-you carnality staged by a woman at the height of her musical, sexual, and manipulative powers. Yeah, if I were David Byrne, I would not want to look awkward around them either.